Sententiae

Sententire

Beauty is the soul's delight perfectly articulate and organised.

Where the soul does not speak out, where the rhythm of the spirit does not manifest, there comes in ugliness.

Things are ugly when they are not true to themselves, not sincere, not self-expressive.

In a sense, natural and beautiful are the same, the perverse commensurate with the ugly.

* * *

Beauty is not merely balance, symmetry, measure, a regular disposition of features. A form, an embodiment, need not be pretty to be beautiful.

Mere formal beauty is a power, but a surface power; there is a deeper unity of rhythm in the embodiment that is beautiful by its transparent soul-expression.

* * *

Consciousness is the light that flows from the Truth of existence.

To be conscious means to be aware of the Truth of one's nature and live and move with the luminous force of that Truth.

Awareness is not a mere passive phenomenon; it is supremely active and dynamic. To be aware means a constant radiation of the light of consciousness and by the touch of that light a continuous purification and new-creation.

* * *

If you happen to be in the way of the Divine Power; either you yield to it and are taken up into its substance and constitution, become an integral part of it, execute in it a special function–

Or, you oppose it and are mowed down and destroyed.

The Dark Power tries to work in the self-same way; but it cannot touch you, even though you oppose it, if from the outset you are armed with the protection of the Divine Force.

The Dark Power too gives protection to its devotees, but it cannot maintain them long against the inexorable on-coming of the Divine.

* * *

The Soul is a portion of the Divine, enshrined in the heart of the human being; it is the child of the Mahashakti, it is the immortal in mortality, the secret godhead that urges the earthly creature ever forward and upward in the march of evolution, ever expressing and embodying more and more of its inner truth in the actualities of life.

The Self is the Purusha in the individual; it is the consciousness as pure being, simply existent in its own delight, which sees and sanctions all and is yet aloof from the mutabilities of the life's becoming.

The Spirit is the Self immanent, universal and transcendent.

The Supreme Divine is Purushottama,–the Spirit and its expression and its continent, the Sat and the Shakti.

* * *

Two godheads are there: one above, the other here below. One is transcendent, the other immanent; one is eternal, infinite, immutable, absolute, the other is of the temporal and in it, wedded to the finite, the changing, the relative; one is sovereignly conscious, the other embedded in the unconscious. One is the godhead that is, the other the godhead that is becoming.

One is the godhead in eternal Truth–nitya, swarupa; the other is the godhead in ever progressive Reality–vyavahara, rupa. Both are one and the same deity. The godhead above, descending, has become the godhead here below ascending to meet again and recover its original nature–not there, but here.

Creation is the interaction of these two elemental Powers expressing themselves as Nature –Nature, an Involution and Evolution of the double Divinity.

Progress is the march of the godhead below towards a triumphant self-revelation; its self-finding is the luminous realisation in itself of the godhead above.

* * *

Religion is a worship of lesser gods; often, even, it is the worship of beings that are not gods at all but pose as gods, simulating their truth, usurping their status, acting arbitrarily in their divine name and aping their authority.

The pseudo-gods are not always evil, nor do they lead men only to perdition: their worship may often be useful, even salutary. But what these beings will not allow is to let man pass beyond a given frontier; they will not suffer him to rise in the scale of consciousness higher than a certain limit. Any attempt or turn towards a transcending of that limit they watch with jealous vigilance and suppress it with vehemence, even with violence. Within their domain, subject to their dharma, they accord to their worshippers prosperity and power, sometimes perhaps even a certain elevation of consciousness.

The lesser gods and the pseudo-gods are none other than the various forces that reign in the world of the mental, the vital or the physical consciousness. These are the three planes that, in the cosmic as well as in the human scale, form the fundamental notes of the Inferior Hemisphere of Nature.

The true gods belong to higher reaches, they are powers of the Superior Hemisphere; living beyond the triple mundane consciousness, in the Fourth–turiya–they are native to the domain of the Spirit. They embody the mighty universal laws of that vaster Truth-Consciousness (Ritam).

To go beyond all the dharmas of this three-fold Lower Nature, attain to the Truth-Consciousness of the Fourth Status, incarnate in all that we are, know, will, feel and do the Law or Dharma of the Spirit and of the Spirit alone, is what we mean by Spirituality.